The MUSE Data Reduction Pipeline: Status after Preliminary Acceptance Europe

TL;DR

The paper reports on the status of the MUSE data reduction pipeline after preliminary acceptance, detailing its functionality, calibration efforts, and readiness for on-sky commissioning at the VLT.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the MUSE data reduction system, including recent calibration work and pipeline testing, marking progress towards operational deployment.

Findings

Successful geometrical calibration of the instrument

Pipeline capable of transforming raw data into calibrated data cubes

Ready for on-sky commissioning at the VLT

Abstract

MUSE, a giant integral field spectrograph, is about to become the newest facility instrument at the VLT. It will see first light in February 2014. Here, we summarize the properties of the instrument as built and outline functionality of the data reduction system, that transforms the raw data that gets recorded separately in 24 IFUs by 4k CCDs, into a fully calibrated, scientifically usable data cube. We then describe recent work regarding geometrical calibration of the instrument and testing of the processing pipeline, before concluding with results of the Preliminary Acceptance in Europe and an outlook to the on-sky commissioning.